Rhino Puzzlings

 The paperback edition is available now, through the usual sources. Updated links are on the Books page of the main site . Thank you for reading! 🧩🦏    

  Trouble  is nearly here, again. I set a deadline for myself for getting the eBook out the door, hoping to force myself to remember all the lessons I'd learned while formatting  The Fall and Rise of @TheRealyJoyG  and to take advantage of the code setup I'd done for that. (Caution: nerd link.) Learning how to make tradeoffs has been a great lesson for me--how much time do I want to spend tweaking formatting, and how much am I willing to surrender to a predefined template? What's my budget for art (answer: low to no) and how willing am I to push myself to learn a new tool to adhere to that budget (answer: very willing, with no timeline.) I learned a lot of lessons with @JoyG and getting the .epub out the door and the paperback prepared for  Trouble  have locked them in. The paperback lands June 30th . True to form, I'm back in first-draft mode for another story, and also resurrecting  One Last Quest  into a whole new edition. Looking at where I'...

I gotta slow down. That's a lesson I have to internalize while I'm working. Drawing to the end of a project feels like holding my breath through a long tunnel (we still do this, right?) and glimpsing the daylight peeping at the far end, until the circle expands and enfolds me. After months of rewrites, revisions, betas, more revisions, reading and re-reading, the pace of the piece picks up , until there's little time to breathe. It's thrilling, exciting, a relief that the end truly is in sight, and that I can pick up yet another WIP and start again because I'm a lunatic. The "Publish Now!" button is so very tantalizing, right there, under my fingertip...  click me... click me now... I need to stop listening to buttons. The buttons are liars. The buttons are in cahoots with the gremlins. The gremlins are ultimately driving the urgency, I believe, stoking the coal in my eagerness boiler, if I'm allowed to mangle a metaphor. The gremlins do not care abou...

I needed to learn so many  new  things when shifting from a purely writing-for-myself recreational writer, to a maybe-someone-will-read-this author. Formatting is a huge subject, much too long for this post, though I'm happy to talk about it and my own journey through it (a journey ongoing.) Marketing is another, and something I'm not great at right now, though I have an excuse handy. The biggest teaching I've had thus far is  the value of the back catalog.  "The best marketing for your first book is your second book" goes Internet wisdom, and I agree. I took a break--a long break--between One Last Quest and @TheRealJoyG , a gap year that was more like a dozen gap years, with as many manuscripts drafted and "trunked." Coming back into self-publishing/indie publishing after so many years away was like moving back to a former hometown: the skyline has changed, the geography is familiar, the people are all strangers. And yet it felt like a homecoming. And ...

Wherein your humble rhino is again approached by a stranger bearing great tidings I hate to say that  skepticism  is perhaps the most useful tool you have in your writer's toolbox, but it will certainly save you from a lot of heartache. Skepticism about one's own brilliance, for example, helps develop the necessary, detached, critical eye needed to edit. Skepticism about a character's motivations, their actions, their words, and their taste in romantic partners can enrich the page ("would Caroline  really  fall so hard for a sardine speculator? Where's that red pencil...") And then of course, skepticism that the lovely, grand, flattering, heart-swelling email that landed in your inbox is your ticket to fame, fortune, and accolades. While mucking out the Spam folder, I turned over this gem. Please note that the book "Amanda" is fluttering over is not available for sale, has not been available for at least a decade, and has not actually sold in that in...

Launched today, Trouble is available for purchase as an eBook now , and a paperback  real soon.  I'm chasing the last of the gremlins out of the text. 🧩🦏